1,861 research outputs found
Examining insurance companies’ use of technology for innovation
No full textThe insurance industry is innovating. Business models, services and processes are rapidly evolving, largely backed by technological developments. The particular his- torical context of COVID-19 provides a suitable case to understand the relevance of exploiting technology to react quickly to traditional and emerging risks. Focusing on the initiatives put in place by the most influential insurance companies at the global level, we have framed the innovation mechanisms in the industry, highlighting four rationales underpinning these initiatives (Adaption, Expansion, Reaction and Aggression), which differ according to the relevance of the technology in use and innovation to the portfolio of risks covered. Overall, it emerges that insurance com- panies have the room and capability to innovate, in many cases using technological applications to cover new and existing risks. While the initiatives studied concern the entire value chain, basic primary activities, such as product development, sales and claims management, show that innovation based on new or existing technology determines the success and competitiveness of the business
Insurtech and New Technologies Effect on the Relationship between Insurance and Prevention: A Systematic Literature Review
No full text
Translating technological innovation into efficiency: the case of US public P&C insurance companies
No full textIn recent years, Insurtech innovations, driven by technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain, emerged in the insurance industry, with the promise of improving efficiency. However, while the positive impact of technology on insurance companies’ efficiency is expected, literature assessing it empirically is scarce, when it comes to recent technological change. Focusing on the US public P&C insurance sector in the period 2012–2018 and relying on both nonparametric (two stage DEA) and parametric (SFA) approaches, it emerges that on average insurance companies were not able to leverage on technological innovations to improve their efficiency. On average a relative level of efficiency among companies, according to a two stage DEA model, was quite stable in time, while the SFA approach shows that the distance between efficient and less efficient firms slightly increased. Moreover, we found one very efficient firm, almost a leader of the market in terms of efficiency, and a homogeneous group of followers, indicating that there is vast scope for improvement for less efficient companies. Nevertheless, even the most efficient company impaired its efficiency over time, suggesting that neither the leader nor on average the followers properly leveraged technology to improve their efficiency. In a competitive scenario, with new players’ entrance and fierce competition, inertia may seriously affect their positioning. Academicians, managers and policymakers should carefully consider the effects that a non-improvement of efficiency following technological change may have on market structure, competition and regulations, potentially opening to further discussion on how technological innovations adoption should be facilitated
Polymer Photonics for Thermal Management
No full textOverview. The thesis will be structured in six different chapters:
• Chapter 1 will briefly introduce the topic of distributed Bragg reflectors and will serve as a general theoretical introduction to Chapters 2, 3 and 6, as well as parts of Chapters 4 and 5. The general theory presented can be found on many books on the topic – Saleh’s Fundamentals of Photonics, Giusfredi’s Manual of Optics, Hecht’s Optics, and especially MacLeod’s Thin Film Optical Filters to cite some – but the data reported are calculated with codes developed by me over the years.
• Chapter 2 will introduce the problem of excessive heating, the use of air conditioning and the challenges of managing temperature of indoor environments in a warming climate.
The work on aegises for thermal management will be presented, intended as distributed Bragg reflectors reflecting near-infrared radiation. In the chapter, the first instances of this kind of structures are designed, reported, characterized and tested for thermal shielding, achieving promising results. The data presented were published in Lanfranchi et al., ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2022, 14, 12, 14550.
• Chapter 3 will continue the same line of research, following the results reported in Lanfranchi et al., Chem. Eng. Sci. 2024, 283, 5, 119377. The chapter will delve deeper into the topic of all-polymer aegises, providing a complete design rationale, followed by an exploration of the different materials that can be used and their influence on the thermal shielding performances with a complete characterization of the samples.
• Chapter 4 will transition from thermal shielding to radiative cooling, providing a different example of passive thermal management. The focus will be on the challenges of the research field, the building of a quantitative model to describe the phenomenon as well as reporting the results achieved so far with various measuring setup and structures. All data reported are unpublished.
• Chapter 5 reports the results I obtained during my period abroad, while I was working on the assembly of an external cavity laser setup by Prof. Benea-Chelmus at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (CH). The workflow for the assembly of the setup in its iterations, the characterization of the parts and the final results will be presented. All the data reported are unpublished.
• Chapter 6 will briefly report the results of all the collaborations and side projects I worked on during this years. Most of them will be published results (Megahd et al., ACS Omega 2024, 7, 18, 15499; Mater. Chem. Frontiers 2022, 6, 17, 2413; Benvenuti et al., J. Mater. Chem. C 2024, 12, 12, 4243; Magnasco et al., ACS Omega 2024, 9, 41, 42375; Martusciello et al., ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2024, 16, 38, 51384; Baouch et al., Add. Manufactur, 2024, 83, 31, 104063), with few relative to work in preparation (Martusciello et al., submitted 2024, Di Fonzo et al., in preparation).
• Appendices contain the Fresnel coefficients (A.1), a thorough description of transfer matrix method (A.2) and additional details on experimental procedures (B.1).Chapter 2: The looming ghost of climate change is ever pushing the developed world to the principles of sustainability and energy efficiency. In this regard, air conditioning systems are an essential mean in a warming climate, as well as a problem due to their high energy consumption and the tendency to worsen the urban heat island phenomenon. I investigated a passive method able to reduce the internal heating of screened objects – thermal shielding. I designed and fabricated aegises, multilayer dielectric mirrors able to reflect light in the near-infrared range while maintaining transparency in the visible range. Near-infrared light amounts to half the total energy of sunlight and is efficiently absorbed by bodies thanks to the vibrational overtones and combination bands of their moieties. The aegises were designed to reflect near-infrared light in correspondence to the principal absorption peaks of selected test materials, namely water and paraffine – chosen to emulate ubiquitous moieties such as O-H and C-H, present respectively in water/ambient humidity and polymer/organic materials. The aegises were fabricated via solution processing (spin-coating) using poly(acrylic acid), cellulose acetate and poly (N-vinylcarbazole). Samples were thoroughly characterized and their optical response calculated with the suitable model, obtaining a good agreement. Different structures were investigated, namely single distributed Bragg reflectors, tandem aegises, and superperiodic ones. All the structures were subjected to thermal experiments to assess their performances in thermal shielding; while screening representative test materials (water and paraffine), I obtained efficiencies in temperature increase reduction as large as 20 %, rising to more than 50 % with reduced bandwidth of incident radiation. The results were correlated with the aegises’ efficacy in shielding absorption peaks – spectral coverage, yielding promising results in the thermal shielding field.Chapter 3: Following up to the promising results described in the previous Chapter 2, I continued on the topic of using distributed Bragg reflectors as aegises, near-infrared reflectors for thermal shielding. In this regard, I developed a new rationale to optimize a priori the efficacy in thermal shielding of a certain structure; this rationale considers the spectrum of incident radiation, the absorption spectrum of the sample to be shielded, as well as the optical response of the aegis. Following this reasoning, I designed an optimized structure, a tandem of four distributed Bragg reflectors stacked one on top of the other. I afterwards fabricated the structure out of different polymer pairs, to test the effect of material choice on the aegises’ performances. Indeed, I fabricated aegises going from commercial polymers (polystyrene and cellulose acetate) to technical, high-performance ones (the fluorinated polymer Aquivion and poly(N-vinylcarbazole)). The progressive increase in difference of refractive index between the building blocks (dielectric contrast) in the aegises fabricated of progressively better-performing materials, going from 0.11 to 0.27, yielded a consistent improve in the efficiency, both in calculations as well as in the experiment. Indeed, when using aegises to shield water from the heating effect of 250 W incandescent lamp, efficiencies rising from 6 to 27 % were obtained. Additionally to the possibility of improved efficiency, the use of technical materials would allow a consistent material saving.Chapter 4: Radiative cooling fits in the general frame of thermal management, being a passive option of cooling down bodies even below ambient temperature in certain situations. The phenomenon exploits the thermal radiation spontaneously emitted by bodies in the atmospheric transparency region, the 8-13 μm wavelength range where the Earth’s atmosphere is relatively transparent. Electromagnetic radiation emitted in this region will pass through the atmosphere and be lost in the void of space, effectively granting a net cooling flow in a completely energy-free manner.
In this Chapter, after a general introduction, I report the modeling of the phenomenon, going from equations to the Matlab code I wrote to predict the effect for different materials. I also present some general considerations upon the calculations as far as the different types of ideal radiative coolers (narrowband and broadband) are concerned. Afterwards, I report on the challenges of building the necessary setup to observe the phenomenon, investigating the nuances of the measurements. I then introduce the nonsolvent-induced phase separation method for the fabrication of white polymer diffusers, in my case made of either cellulose acetate or recycled poly(vinyl chloride). Preliminary results on poly(vinyl chloride samples) are presented, attaining sub-ambient cooling. The samples of cellulose acetate are instead fully characterized optically and their performances in radiative cooling applications evaluated and comparing with the theoretical values, obtaining good results; follow-up to this research would be integrating aegises reflecting in the Visible-Near Infrared range to enhance the cooling efficiency.Chapter 5: This chapter is mostly standalone with respect to the main research topic, being the motivation for it more of personal growth than following up on photonic structures for thermal management. Nonetheless, there is a connection – Chapter 2-3 evidenced how distributed Bragg reflectors can perform as full-fledged reflectors of near-infrared radiation, lossless and easy to fabricate and tune. Therefore, they can be used for heavily photonics-oriented applications requiring high-performance mirrors. In this chapter, I will report on the assembly of a 1550 nm external cavity laser setup which uses the same distributed Bragg reflectors reported in Chapter 3 (the “aegises”) as outcoupling mirrors. The external cavity setup is assembled using an antireflection coated laser diode as a light source; the feedback is provided properly aligning the distributed Bragg reflectors to reflect the diode’s light back into it. The laser diode is characterized thoroughly, and then included into an external cavity setup with different mirrors, both distributed Bragg reflectors as well as metallic mirrors, are used as outcouplers. The external cavity laser assembled this way is characterized both in spectrum and in power; although no interesting effect is observed in the spectra, due to the extreme difficulty in aligning the setup properly, the influence of the external cavity on the light output-current intensity curve is apparent. The results show that using mirrors with different reflectance values allow to tune the slope of the light output-current intensity curve, the amount of spontaneous emission channeled in lasing modes, as well as the final light output. In this regard, the aegises performed better than gold-chromium mirrors with same reflectance value, due to the absence of absorption losses in the former. The results obtained here are interesting for future applications of polymer distributed Bragg reflectors in external cavity laser applications.Chapter 6: Chapters 2-5 of this thesis included the work I performed during these years regarding the main topics of research, photonics structures for thermal shielding and radiative cooling, as well as the use of the same structures for physics-oriented applications such as the assembly of an external cavity laser setup. However, I also worked on side-topics collaborating with colleagues, both internally to the research group as well as externally to it. In this final chapter I will briefly introduce these topics, with a special focus on the role I invested in the various projects. For the full picture on each work I suggest looking at the reference paper (where available), as information reported here is incomplete:
• Subsection 6.1 covers the fabrication of red-reflecting mirrors for on-chip sensing (project in collaboration with the CNR of Bologna), that led to Benvenuti et al., J. Mater. Chem. C 2024, 12, 12, 4243;[1]
• Subsection 6.2 covers the use of photonic structures for emission control and radiative rate modification, that led to Megahd et al., ACS Omega 2024, 7, 18, 15499 and Mater. Chem. Frontiers 2022, 6, 17, 2413;[2, 3]
• Subsection 6.3 covers the use of all-organic photonic structures for strong light-matter coupling. Di Fonzo et al., in preparation;
• Subsection 6.4 covers the use of photonic structures as sensors of chemicals in vapor phase (Magnasco et al., ACS Omega 2024, 9, 41, 42375)
• Subsection 6.5 covers the fabrication of elastomeric DBRs which change color when strained, viable as strain and stress sensors (Martusciello et al., ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2024, 16, 38, 51384);[4]
• Subsection 6.6 covers the integration in 3d printing workflow of thermal IR analysis (Baouch et al., Add. Manufactur, 2024, 83, 31, 104063);[5]
• Subsection 6.7 covers the conversion of a 3d-printer into a dip-coating machine for the automated fabrication of photonic structures (Martusciello et al., in preparation)
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